Like a lot of moviegoers, I do enjoy the various works in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They’re often at least fun. True, few if any of them count as serious works of deep art, but even the weaker entries are at least entertaining. However, Marvel is at an interesting stage right now. Many of the original characters from their “Phase One’ have been phased out for one reason or another, and with Avengers: Endgame acting as a capstone to a decade’s worth of interconnected films. Now a new “Phase” means new heroes, and Marvel needs to dig a bit deeper into its catalog of characters to find the stars. To date, Marvel has been successful at this, taking lesser known characters and making them popular heroes that get big box office results. Even many Marvel fans might be hard-pressed to say who the Guardians of the Galaxy were before they got their own movie, and Shang-Chi is almost certainly in that same boat.
To that end, we have Eternals, based on a Jack Kirby-created work when the King of Comics was interested in mythology as a source for superheroes and he wasn’t working with Stan Lee. The Guardians had the benefit of the unique approach of writer/director James Gunn. Shang-Chi’s movie was the first solo adventure for an Asian superhero in Western film. What does Eternals have going for it? Director Chloe Zhao, fresh off her Best Director and Best Picture win for the arthouse movie Nomadland. What will that means for what is perhaps the most obscure group of heroes Marvel has given a starring role to yet?
The Eternals, we are told, are immortal aliens from the planet Olympia. They do the bidding of the godlike Celestials, particularly Arishem the Judge (voice actor David Kaye). They are ten in number, led by healer Ajak (Salma Hayek). If anything, they seem to be divided between fighters and guides. There’s aloof warrior woman Thena (Angelina Jolie), confident Superman-like Ikaris (Richard Madden), friendly superstrong Gilgamesh (Don Lee), dour mind controller Druig (Barry Keoghan), smartass energy manipulator Kingo (Kumail Nanijiani), illusion casting perpetual child Sprite (Lia McHugh), brilliant inventor Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), cheerful deaf speedster Makkari (Lauren Ridloff), and compassionate matter manipulator Sersi (Gemma Chan). Most of the narrative focus is on Ikaris and Sersi, longtime lovers who first met when they arrived on Earth 7,000 or so years ago but broke up a century before. These days, Sersi is living in London with Sprite while dating mortal man Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington).
By the by, points for Zhao for not doing a Game of Thrones reference for a brief scene where Madden and Harrington met.
Regardless, the Eternals’ mission is to hunt down and destroy the Deviants, a race of alien predators that made their way to Earth. The Eternals accomplished that centuries before, and now they’re just waiting for Arishem to let them go home. Since then, they also more or less separated and are off living their own lives individually, some with greater contact than others, and some more publicly than others–such as Kingo, who set himself up as a Bollywood star descended from a long line of Bollywood stars, all of which were him. However, the Deviants somehow have returned, one of which is a lot stronger and smarter than they’ve ever been before (Bill Skarsgard). It would seem the mission is not over just yet. Besides, this time the Deviants seem to be hunting Eternals instead of humans.
Now, my only familiarity with Zhao’s work was Nomadland, so I wasn’t sure how she would handle something with more of a narrative behind it. I knew it would be beautifully shot, and in many ways, it is the most beautiful Marvel movie to date. It’s also clearly an ambitious movie. Spanning millennia, the movie goes back to the past to show things like why the group broke up and what motivated some of them to go the way they do. There’s some truly impressive fight scenes, such as pretty much anytime Makkari does anything. The look to the Eternals’ powers is also rather cool, represented by golden lines and circles appearing around them as they manifest their powers in different ways. Plus, the central concept of what the Eternals and the Celestials are was adapted in a way that fits the MCU. Diehard Marvel Comics fans who have read up about any of these characters might be a little surprised to find a Celestial talking as they are notoriously silent in any comic I have seen them in with one or two exceptions, but I didn’t have a problem with Arishem delivering the occasional infodump. So, Marvel producer Kevin Feige’s promise that Eternals would be a different kind of Marvel movie was essentially true.
However, this is also a two-and-a-half hour movie that feels slow and deliberate. That wouldn’t be a problem for me. It’s not even the first Marvel movie to go considerably over two hours. But these characters are all rather thinly sketched. Some get more screentime and development than others. Sersi and Ikaris are clearly the narrative focus, but for the rest, unless the actor playing them has a very distinctive personality, as seen with Phastos, Kingo, and to a certain extent Gilgamesh, there isn’t a lot to go on. And for all that she is probably the biggest name actor in the movie, Jolie seems to disappear from the narrative, often standing literally in the background. There’s a narrative reason for this, but there were times when I had to remind myself she was in the movie. Eternals is in many ways a bold experiment, and I will always encourage that sort of thing. But the end result is just rather bland. Despite the fate of the world once again being in grave danger, I couldn’t bring myself to care too much for any of these characters. They were not terribly well-developed, and their problems were not given time to breathe, particularly in the cases of Druig and Makkari. This is one where the story might have benefited with either a smaller cast or maybe a Disney+ series to explore the different Eternals before throwing them all together in the end. It’s not a bad movie, and I actually wouldn’t mind Zhao getting another shot at a movie like this as she is certainly enthusiastic about this work in every interview of hers I have heard, including one as I was driving home from the theater, but I am also not all that interested in revisiting this particular movie any time soon.
Grade: C
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